Our Path to 46

Our 5-year journey to become Adirondack 46ers.

Completing our 46th High Peak

We are Adirondack 46ers, having climbed the 46 highest peaks* in the Adirondack State Park in New York.

Living 400 miles from the park, becoming 46ers took 5 years, starting with our summit of Cascade Mountain in July 2009 and finishing on a marvelous hike to Mount Colden on August 4, 2014. It encompassed 28 total hikes with one 5-peak traverse, a 4-peak and several 3-peak ones, all of them completed as day hikes. In total, we hiked over 320 miles and 110,000 vertical feet.

As 46ers, we will forever be linked to and enamored with the Adirondack mountains. Our hiking there is by no means complete, and the 28 hikes/46 High Peaks on this page are a testament to how we’ve grown as hikers and as people since that July in 2009.

For fun, we added our 3 favorite summits, hikes, and trails, and also picked our three hardest hikes. Keep in mind that our favorites/hardest reflect the time & conditions of our hikes as well as our own physical and mental condition. For example, Kathy picked Donaldson/Emmons/Seward as her second hardest hike, which surely had a not insignificant impact from our completion of Haystack/Basin/Saddleback the day prior. Likewise, we didn’t judge the summits of Big Slide, Phelps, Santanoni, Couchsachraga, Blake, or Saddleback since they were socked in when we arrived.

* Note: The 46 mountains necessary to become a 46er are the ones that brothers Bob & George Marshall climbed with their guide Herbert Clark, finishing in 1925. The three originally sought to climb all the 4,000-foot mountains in the Adirondacks; modern surveying shows that one mountain (MacNaughton) is 4,000 feet but not in the list, and four (Blake, Cliff, Nye and Couchsachraga) are lower. In fact, Couchsachraga is the 60th highest in the park. Because of the history with the Marshall brothers and Herbert Clark, the 46ers organization kept the original peaks as requirements for entry.